Goddesses & Doormats: Anand Jon’s Rape Trial Begins

“I am my own god and I get whatever I want,” fashion designer Anand Jon is quoted in court documents as telling one of his alleged rape victims. Another girl was a 16-year-old virgin and home-schooled Mormon who, in 2003, was taking her first tentative step into secular society. She claims Jon, 34, whose full name is Anand Jon Alexander, welcomed her to that society by sodomizing her until she bled.

The woman, known as Kristy W., is one of several similarly damaged witnesses prosecutor Frances Young declared, in her opening statement, she would call to testify against Jon, who faces life in prison if convicted of all of the 25 counts charged against him. Young delivered her 80-minute statement in a somewhat shaky voice that was punctuated by a TMZ-style PowerPoint show complete with radiating images of Jon and certain words (notably “Guilty”) that pulsated and grew as they appeared on the screen.

“Goddesses and Doormats” was the name Jon had given one of his fashion collections, a moniker that assumed heavily metaphoric meaning as Young’s statement progressed. The deputy district attorney sketched a modus operandi in which Jon trolled Internet modeling sites to contact and lure somewhat short and slightly overweight young women – many of whom were also under-aged – to his “studios” in Manhattan and Beverly Hills for modeling work. The studios turned out to be messy apartments and the “work” was house work – in addition to repeated acts of rape, forced copulation and sodomy.

Prosecution testimony will include entries from what Jon allegedly called his “Conquest List,” a computer diary of Jon’s romantic interludes, written in text-speak. Samples:

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Throughout this, Jon sat grim-faced. He was joined in court by his sister, Sanjana, and his good friend Marla Maples. Jon’s lead lawyer, Leonard Levine, counterattacked by implying that computers seized from Jon’s Beverly Hills pad would be shown to belong to other people. That could only be a balm for Jon, since the computers in question contain thousands of images of child pornography. Compared to Young, Levine was a master actor on the court stage, though he lost a few points for showing way too much of Jon’s self-glorifying Web site. One point that Levine repeatedly drove home was that the young women called to testify against Jon will be asked by the defense to explain why some of them stayed with their rapist long after they allegedly escaped his clutches. Testimony begins Monday.